Even further along the road to conjecture, we have two interesting baptism records from Devonshire County in England. Both of these records are found in the International Genealogical Index (IGI), which is a project of the Mormon Church of Latter Day Saints. The IGI has been divided into two parts; "community contributed" records, which come from anybody who knows how to submit data, and "community indexed" records, which are supposed to have been transcribed from official government or church sources.

Among the IGI "contributed" records, we find one for Thomas Deeble, son of Robert Deeble, with a christening date of 1613 in Exeter, Devonshire. This date lines up with the age of the Thomas who sailed with the Hull company, taking into consideration the fact that a christening did not always occur within a few days or weeks of a child's birth in those days.

The IGI "indexed" records include a Thomasine Deeble, daughter of Robert Deeble, who was christened on April 11, 1613, at St. Andrew's church in Plymouth, Devonshire. Some people have speculated that "Thomasine" is a transcription error and that Thomasine is actually Thomas. If so, this baptism date also corresponds to the age of Thomas on the passenger list. However, this parish register also has a Frances, daughter of Robert, baptized in March 1622; she would only have been about 14, not 24, when the Hull company sailed.

Plymouth is an attractive town for Robert and Thomas to come from, because the first church in Dorchester, Massachusetts, was established in Plymouth, Devonshire, in 1630.

In any event, most Dibble genealogies give 1613 or 1614 for the year of Thomas of Dorchester's birth, but that can be calculated by working backward from his age on the passenger list.

Edkins was able to make out some of the text on the back of the document that records Samuel's and Hepzibah's change of testimony (I was unable to read any of it). Her transcript includes the lines, "Israel took her by the arm & layd her downe & would have forced her but she said she would cry out He sayd he would stop her mouth with his Glove".

It is not unusual for people to delay reporting a rape to the authorities, but the first thing that was reported was a complaint of adultery by Bartlett against his wife. He knew something had happened immediately; he confronted her right after the event occurred, though in the presence of Israel and his brother. If she had told him as soon as they were alone together that it was rape, why did he not go to court the next day (Thursday, January 23, 1668) and charge Israel with rape? If he didn't believe her, why did he wait until March 1 to charge her with adultery? Of course, one likely explanation is that they tried to reconcile and failed; perhaps the relationship took that long to deteriorate to the point that he was angry enough to go to court and see her flogged or perhaps even hanged. There is no indication of a subsequent divorce, but that record may have been lost. It also seems possible that Bartlett simply waited until the first day that court was in session that year. In many small communities in the early days of settlement, court was in session only for specific brief periods of time.

If there was an assault, it also doesn't make sense for Deborah to have first confessed to adultery. She may have felt ashamed in either case (it is not unusual for rape victims to feel shame), but surely it would be at least marginally better to be seen by the Puritan townsfolk as a victim of rape than as a willing adulteress.

Edkins advances the attractive supposition that Thomas rallied the family to collaborate on their testimony to protect its reputation as a whole and the life of Israel in particular.

Still, it is quite strange that, with all of the other records extant, there is no record of the court's disposition of the case. Both rape and adultery were very serious crimes in 17th. century Connecticut; a guilty verdict on either charge would have had catastrophic consequences. This leaves open the possibility that the judge (or Magistrate--his name was Henry Wolcot[t] Jr. and he was a member of the House of Magistrates, the upper house of the state legislature) didn't think any of the witnesses were credible.

Samuel and Hepzibah seemed, at first, rather eager to get their older brother in trouble. And Israel was visiting in Benjamin Bartlett's house. Bartlett had just left to get some cider. So (according to Israel's sister Miriam, but not to Israel himself), Israel goes to get cider, too? In his own cellar, tramping through the snow in the orchard? Miriam actually testified that she hung up Israel's wet and dirty pants two days in a row, and added that the snow was very deep in the orchard. Benjamin Bartlett, while accusing his wife and reporting that she had confessed, also allegedly told Thomas Dibble Jr. that he thought "that which was sed to be dun was not dun where she sed it was but sumwhere else". This sort of thing is the reason why modern courts don't permit hearsay testimony. The judge may have listened to all of this for a while, then thrown up his hands, decided they were carrying on some sort of family feud, and tossed them all out of court.

On the other hand, the weight of the wealthy and influential Thomas Dibble and his family upon this small town must have been considerable. Seeing that they were determined to stand together, Wolcot, an elected office-holder, may have decided that it was above his pay grade to go against them (or, in the colorful English saying, he was a "Jobsworth") and pronounce one of them guilty.

There are a couple of other minor mysteries in the case. One of the documents has testimony from a "Jone Dible aged 55 years". No one has been able to find a candidate for this person. The age is the same as that of Thomas Sr. Thomas had a daughter named Joanna, but she is believed to have died young. Perhaps this was the shadowy older son of Robert Deeble, John Deeble (though he would have been closer to 65 at this time, if he was there--and there is no reason to believe he was). Perhaps the clerk simply meant to write "Tom" and botched the record. Also, Israel's brother Ebenezer gave testimony and his age is recorded as "21 years or there about". Ebenezer was 26 at the time, but maybe he looked younger to the clerk.

The next candidate is the John Dibble who was born to the King Philip's War hero Ebenezer Dibble (son of Thomas, grandson of Robert) in 1673. Van Buren Lamb says this John, with his brother Wakefield, came to Bedford. However, Lamb also says he moved to Mt. Washington, MA, and died "before 1710" in Deerfield, MA, making him an unlikely father for a boy who was baptized in eastern Long Island in October, 1711.

(To further complicate matters, Westchester Patriarchs: A Genealogical History of Westchester County, New York, Families Prior to 1755, by Norman Davis, describes this John son of Ebenezer as the John who bought the "Hopground" in 1702. Davis also reports that he sold it in 1704. Combining this with Lamb's information, it would seem that this John was not in the Bedford/Stamford area for very long at all.)

Third up: George Dibble, a great-grandson of Robert Deeble through Robert's son Thomas, and Thomas' son Thomas Jr. This George has a better claim than either John right off the bat, because the record for the baptism of Jonathan on October 28, 1711 in East Hampton, Suffolk County, NY, which was written by the minister who baptised him and is highly likely to be correct, gives the child's father's name as "George Dibbles".

Van Buren Lamb speculated that George Dibble, son of Israel (see below), had been mixed up in the records with this George. But Lamb has this George being born on April 13, 1687. This would most likely make him too young to be the George Dibble who bought land in March 1703 in East Hampton, Suffolk County, New York, where Jonathan was later baptized. He would have been 16 at the time. Under English common law, he was past the "age of discretion", which allowed him to witness wills or land sales, but he was still an "infant", unable to make most kinds of life decisions on his own. "Infants" could own land (they often inherited it), but they could not sell it. They could buy land conditionally; they had to confirm the sale when they reached the age of 21, at which time they could legally change their minds. So no one in his or her right mind would sell land to a teenager. Also, Lamb has George son of Thomas Jr. dying on April 28, 1709, in Windsor, CT.

We can't be certain that these birth and death dates are correct. I don't know where Lamb got this George's death date. The only documentation for his birthdate is from James Savage's A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England. This is a commonly-used source. But Savage says that in addition to official records that he viewed himself, he relied on "friends" to submit additional data, and he implies a less than critical acceptance of those submissions. One would expect his citations, if correct, to appear in the other most common source of ancient New England records, the Barbour Index, since they both collect the same records, but this George does not.

But if these dates are correct, this George would have been dead for over 2 1/2 years on Jonathan's baptism date of October 28, 1711, a date which, I emphasize again, has to be considered reliable. We could, for the sake of argument, assume that the child was conceived on the day George died and grant a birthdate for Jonathan around February 1, 1710. In those days, people often would wait quite a while to make sure an infant would live before going ahead with a christening, but this scenario asks us to believe that Jonathan's mother waited almost one year and nine months. That's a very long time. Too long to really be credible, I believe.

That leaves George Dibble, great-grandson of Robert Deeble through Robert's son Thomas and Thomas's son Israel. Although we have no firm evidence for this particular George being Jonathan's father, we do know that there was a George Dibble who would have been the right age living in East Hampton at the time of Jonathan's baptism.

We also have the circumstantial evidence of the will of a George Dibble who died before February 2, 1741. The probate abstract says:

We don't have any information on George of East Hampton moving about 75 miles west to Huntington. But this George could have been the East Hampton weaver mentioned in Hedges' History. The will was probated in Stamford, CT, which is just across the Sound from Huntington. "Late of Huntington" almost certainly means that was George's last permanent residence. But if his only living relatives were in Stamford, that might be a reason for probating the will there. Or he may have been visiting them when he died.

Of all of these items, Ingersoll's grave is the most convincing; the year 1834 is there, literally carved in stone, and not likely to be an "engraving error". That immediately casts a shadow on both Jesup and Lamb, as does Harriet's remarkable early role in the founding of the local Universalist church. However, it seems safe to credit the three-county History, whose brief biographies "were prepared, for the most part, by the canvassing agents of the publishers", with equal reliability. So let's conclude by saying that the first Dibbles reached southeastern Indiana in 1832, and all of the characters in our story were there before 1840.

The Cannon Falls Beacon reported on April 9, 1886 (as transcribed in Roots & Wings), that "A few years ago [George Tanner and Dick Dibble] bought out the meat market run by H. N. Geering, and for several years they had the entire monopoly of the business here, there being no other meat market until the fall of 1885." This suggests that the Tanner & Seager butcher shop closed its doors not long after the memoirist saw it in 1880.

In 1880 the US Census reported that William Tanner the younger and Foster B. Seager were butchers. In that same year it recorded George Tanner as a "clerk in store". It seems rather striking, then, that Dick Dibble partnered with a clerk rather than an established butcher for his venture. Roots & Wings is known to contain many errors. But if Dick's partner was actually the butcher William Tanner, why didn't they use the just-closed Tanner & Seager shop, rather than buying out the Geering establishment? It may be that George Tanner's genius was for business, or at least, for bookkeeping, while Dick supplied all of the butchering know-how.

In any case, William Tanner was probably otherwise engaged. We don't know precisely when William Tanner and Foster Seager started their nursery business, but we have a brief biography of Foster Seager ("Railroads in Minnesota, Part II", a website assembled by Lawrence A. Martin) that says he stopped farming after 1875 and implies that the nursery started before 1879. Roots & Wings has an 1886 snippet from the Beacon that says the business was started "in the spring of 1885". Since I know that the meat market existed in 1878, I described that business as the partners' first venture. We only know that their ice business was operating in 1909 (from the Franklyn Curtiss-Wedge history of Goodhue County).

We don't know that Geering immediately moved to St. Paul after selling his business to Tanner & Dibble either; we only know that he had a meat market there in 1891, according to the city directory.

As for the location of the Tanner & Dibble shop: This is pure speculation. We don't know where Geering's shop was. When I wrote the original version of this web page I was confused about the events of the 1884 and 1887 fires, and what stores existed along Fourth Street at different times. For this version I have simply assumed that it was near the same location as Dick's later business with his brother Dan, Dibble Brothers. We know it could not have been in the first three buildings, looking north from Main St. on the west side of the street. (We do know exactly where Dibble Brothers was but I don't want to skip ahead here.) The Estergreen block, a brick building, stood on the corner of Mill St. and the west side of Fourth St., and extended at least far enough south to include one of its successors, the C.B. Johnson Hardware building (in 2014 the northern part of Althoff's Hardware). The Beacon reported in 1886 that Tanner & Dibble occupied a 2-story frame building of over 2,600 square feet. There were six or seven wood-frame storefronts between Scofield's and the Estergreen block, so Tanner & Dibble was probably there, perhaps where the P. A. Peterson Building is today, or somewhat further north where Althoff's Hardware stands.

As for the precise location of the brewery at the time it burned: Chronicles of Cannon Falls (1976) says, ""Another enterprising industry on the North Side was the Kowitz brewery--located a block or so northerly of the river where it is presently crossed by the state trunk highway bridge." Roots & Wings has this to offer: "Kowitz's main business, however, was the north side brewery. ... The buildings and property later housed Lorentz Locker Plant, but the land included up to Highway 20 and more land up to the property later known as the Ray Black farm. Ole Hagen later built a home on the brewery property and dug up old beer bottles in the garden and near the house. Kowitz had also built a large house in the same north side area for his wife and six children. Later the house burned, except for about 1/3, which still remains and is generally known as the Roger Zimmerman house."

The "state trunk highway bridge" seems to be the bridge that connects 4th. St. south of the river with 5th. St. N on the other side of the river. "A block or so northerly" of this bridge puts us at the corner of 5th. St. N and Cannon St. W, which is where the Zimmerman house still stands today. Unfortunately, I can't find the Ole Hagen property. Between the bridge and the river south of Cannon St. W there are five houses, with Cannon Falls Canoe and Bike Rental further to the south, and, in the northeast corner, stands the Raw Bistro Pet Fare factory.

Here we seem to have hit paydirt. According to Mike Lorentz of Lorentz Meats, the dog food factory is the site of Lorentz's original meat processing plant, and the Lorentz family believes that's where the Kowitz Brewery was. Mike's parents, Ed and Mary Lorentz, bought the plant from the Bremer Brothers in 1968, and they say that the Bremers razed the "brewery" in the 1950s to build that plant. The malt house was supposedly the only building that survived the January 1888 fire. However, the 1894 plat map for Cannon Falls shows two structures in this area ("Mill Block 6", which is mentioned in Ferdinand Kowitz's will). One is very close to the river and the Third St. bridge where Raw Bistro is today. The other is further west, southwest of what appears on the plat map as the corner of Fourth St. N and West Cannon St. (Fourth St. and West Cannon do not intersect today). But the Raw Bistro factory may stand where Ferdinand's malt house was.

What about Ferdinand's ice business and hog farm?

There's an old photo showing people cutting ice out of the river near the falls. I don't know which falls those were, or which river they were on; there are and were several falls on both the Cannon and Little Cannon Rivers in and near town (including the "Big Falls", which were destroyed when the Cannon was dammed to create a hydroelectric power plant and Lake Byllesby in 1910, and others lost when the Little Cannon was dammed to create Lake Fredrickson in 1954; the latter dam, and lake, are now gone.) In any case, Ferdinand had plenty of river right alongside his brewery, so there's no reason to believe he didn't cut his ice there.

One would assume that the hog farm occupied the broad stretch of land north of the brewery that Ferdinand owned. But in 1894 there was no Ray Black farm on the Cannon Falls Township plat map, and much of the land north of where the brewery stood was owned by someone named Martha J. whose last name was either St. Clair, as shown on the City plat map for that year, or Sinclair, as indicated by the Cannon Falls Township map. However, there's a town lot and house owned by a Raymond A. Black at 100 Bavarian Circle today, which is near the corner of County 17 Blvd. (Washington St. W) and 1st. St. N, about a half-mile northeast of the Raw Bistro factory.

If "up to Highway 20" (Highway 20 runs north and south all the way through Cannon Falls and beyond; in the main business district it's the same as Fourth St., and on the North Side it's 5th. St. N) means the intersection of Highway 20 and County 29 Blvd, in Randolph near George Kowitz's little parcel, then there's another clue. In 1894 George Bremer owned about 205 acres in Sections 6 and 7, just a bit north of the city. It would make sense for the Bremer Brothers, who took over the location of Ferdinand's saloon by 1910, and of his malt house in the 1950s, for their meat business, to have purchased part of his hog farm as well.

And while we're on the subject, there are some interesting coincidences. Bremer Brothers Meats was established in 1892 and competed with Dick and Dan Dibble's Dibble Brothers for decades. It's interesting that the firm took over the saloon owned by Dick's second father-in-law. And Ed Lorentz, who bought the Bremer plant in 1968, was the brother of Nick Lorentz, whose daughter Mary married Dick's cousin John Dibble, a great-great grandson of Alonzo Dibble.